Jones The Prayers of Jesus

Listening to and Learning from Our Savior
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4335-6284-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

'If your soul is dry and your prayers are dead, here is living water to revive and refresh you.' - David Murray Jesus's ministry on earth as a human was marked by a devotion to prayer. Through his prayer life, we see what it means to truly depend on God. Examining all of Jesus's prayers recorded in the New Testament, this book reflects on the content and structure of the Son of God's words to his Father- helping us imitate his example as we commune with our heavenly Father as adopted sons and daughters in Christ.

Mark Jones (PhD, Leiden Universiteit) serves as the pastor of Faith Vancouver Presbyterian Church (PCA) in British Columbia, Canada. He has authored many books, including Living for God and God Is, and speaks all over the world on Christology and the Christian life. Mark and his wife, Barbara, have four children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jones, Mark

Leseproben

1

Jesus Prayed from His Mother’s Breasts

Psalm 22:9–10

Yet you are he who took me from the womb;

you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts.

On you was I cast from my birth,

and from my mother’s womb you have been my God.

A Holy Beginning

Given what we know about Christ’s parents, particularly his mother Mary, the “favored one” (Luke 1:28), there can be little doubt that our Lord was raised in a pious, God-fearing household. All of the advantages that he needed to be a faithful Mediator were graciously bestowed upon him from his heavenly Father. Naturally, that would have included a family that raised him to know and love the Lord his God. Jesus was a faithful covenant child, a true Israelite in whom there was no deceit.

A child raised in a God-fearing household receives an inestimable blessing. True, to whom much is given much will be required (Luke 12:48). And in the case of the Lord Jesus, much was required of him, which means much was given to him. As we read in Psalm 84:11:

For the Lord God is a sun and shield;

the Lord bestows favor and honor.

No good thing does he withhold

from those who walk uprightly.

God delighted in blessing his only begotten Son from conception and will do so for all eternity.

In the first place, Jesus was a child of the covenant. He was not raised in a pagan environment, having to fend for himself in terms of his religious life.1 Rather, circumcised on the eighth day, he not only possessed the sign of the covenant—a sign of God’s covenant faithfulness to his people (Rom. 4:11)—but also received a name that was to be a badge, daily reminding him of his extraordinarily high calling as God’s Messiah (Luke 2:21). This was to affirm Christ’s solidarity with his father (Joseph) and the covenantal community of which he was a part. Not even our Lord entered the world as a neutral individual. Rather, he was in corporate solidarity with the community of faith (Gal. 3:16–29).

Just as our own identity leads to action, so too with Christ: his identity was the ground for how he lived. “Be who you are” is a statement true of Christ himself and thereby fitting also for his holy people (i.e., we are holy, so we live holy lives).

The key to understanding Christ’s religious life from the womb is to insist that his faith was not solely for him but also for others (i.e., his people). Remember, Christ is the natural Son of God, so his adoption is never in question: he belongs to God. He would impart his own spiritual blessings (e.g., faith, hope, love) to his people by sending his Spirit into their hearts (see John 14–16).

His religious life began from the womb. Psalm 22 finds its ultimate fulfillment in Christ, though its immediate story is that of David. The Father prepared a body for Christ, which was formed by the Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. According to the natural limits of his humanity, Christ’s early prayer life was clearly not as developed as it would be at the end of his life. Experience is a great teacher for our prayers, and the more he experienced, the more his prayers would develop in light of those experiences, challenges, and struggles.

Whatever acts of consent were possible toward the Father, involving the deliberate use of his human will, Christ performed perfectly, but also appropriately according to his age and stage in life. His acts of reason were married together with the holy principles in his heart formed by the Holy Spirit. His heart, soul, mind, and strength all directed his actions in a manner appropriate to his age and capacity for spiritual acts of reason. He possessed the habit of faith from the womb, which would then bring forth particular acts of faith at the appropriate time in response to God and his Word.

God took Christ “from the womb” and “made” him trust at his mother’s breasts (Ps. 22:9). Christ trusted God, but not as though he alone was responsible for his acts of faith toward God. Rather, the Father sustained him so that Christ’s religious life was faithful from the womb to the tomb. In another psalm the reality of spiritual life from the very beginning of our existence comes into focus:

For you, O Lord, are my hope,

my trust, O Lord, from my youth.

Upon you I have leaned from before my birth;

you are he who took me from my mother’s womb.

My praise is continually of you. (Ps. 71:5–6)

If these words are true of the psalmist, how much more are they true of the Son of God! Christ not only trusted from his youth but also leaned on God from before birth. How very different is this Hebrew idea of spirituality, which allows for and celebrates the faith of children from the womb, compared with our rationalistic views today.

We may appreciate the reality of the spiritual life of the young because God is the initiator of true spirituality, and we are not. The Father is never shy regarding his help toward his Son, the righteous servant.

Behold my servant, whom I uphold,

my chosen, in whom my soul delights;

I have put my Spirit upon him;

he will bring forth justice to the nations. (Isa. 42:1)

God upheld his Son in order that the Son, whether eating or drinking, might bring glory to God (1 Cor. 10:31). As the Son was cast upon the Father from birth, there was never a time when the Father was not his God (Ps. 22:10). Not only Psalm 22 but also Psalm 8 speaks of the reality of Christ’s religious life from the womb:

Out of the mouth of babies and infants,

you have established strength because of your foes,

to still the enemy and the avenger. (Ps. 8:2)

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) asks, “Was our Lord so early a believer? Was he one of those babes and sucklings out of whose mouths strength is ordained? So it would seem; and if so, what a plea for help!”2 Our Lord, the pioneer of our faith (Heb. 12:2)—meaning he himself lived by faith in God—was never without the graces of faith, hope, and love. As John Calvin (1509–1564) argued:

Truly, Christ was sanctified from earliest infancy in order that he might sanctify in himself his elect from every age without distinction. . . . Thus, he was conceived of the Holy Spirit in order that, in the flesh taken, fully imbued with the holiness of the Spirit, he might impart that holiness to us. If we have in Christ the most perfect example of all the graces which God bestows upon his children, in this respect also he will be for us a proof that the age of infancy is not utterly averse to sanctification.3

In other words, the holy life of Christ from the beginning, we are told, was one of conscious awareness of God because God made it so. Jesus’s life of dependence on and awareness of God his Father was axiomatic to his existence as a true human being made in God’s image and sustained by the Spirit of the living God. As natural as it was for him to breath God’s air, so too he found it the most natural thing in the world to look to God, by faith, in order to know him and delight in him. Truly, if anyone prayed without ceasing—from his first breath to his last—it was Jesus of Nazareth (1 Thess. 5:17).

A Holy Teenager

As Jesus grew older, we are told, he became “strong, filled with wisdom”—God’s favor (grace) was upon him (Luke 2:40). By age twelve Jesus would have possessed a deep knowledge of God, but a knowledge filled with filial devotion to his heavenly Father. The temple incident in Luke 2, when Jesus remained in Jerusalem, shows that he was asking and answering questions that amazed others (vv. 46–47). After a rebuke from his parents, who had been searching for him for days, Jesus informed them that he was doing what was appropriate: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (v. 49). After this, Luke informs his readers that Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (v. 52).

God comes first. This was the radical principle of Christ’s actions during his life. Not his parents’ will, however important it was for him to be submissive to them; not his own will, however natural a thing that would be for a holy, undefiled person; but the will of his Father was omnipotent in the life of the Son of God.

Speaking of Christ’s earlier years, David M. M’Intyre suggests that Christ would

join not only in the worship of the home, but also in the prayers of the synagogue, breathing into them, without doubt, a deeper meaning than that which lay in the mere letter of the word, as He supplicated Heaven’s mercy, not only on His fellow-townsmen of Nazareth, but on all the people of Israel and on the Seventy Nations beyond.4

What a...